October 5, 2019
A motto for our second day aboard Queen Mary 2: Don't just do something, sit there.
We attended a show at The Britannia Theatre last night, featuring a doo-wop group named The Four Flashbacks. Most of us onboard remember, I think, when the songs sung were new, which means that we are, well, old. The Flashbacks were good; not exactly my cup of tea but a winsome brew nevertheless, with just the right amount of sugar.
Today we're off on a tour of colonial Providence R.I., The weather is good.
Providence, we're told, has more colonial buildings than any other place in America. They are, as one would expect, centrally located; they are also beautifully preserved.
What distinguished the colony of Rhode Island was that its founder, Roger Williams, permitted those of all faiths, (that is, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews) to practice their religions freely. (For the Puritans, religious liberty meant that one was indeed free--to be a Puritan). The question of Islam, not to mention that of the as yet almost unheard of faiths of Hinduism and Buddhism, apparently never arose).
We saw a fine synagogue:
Jews must have welcomed the opportunity to stand proudly on the island of their faith in a hostile sea, which was still the spiritual geography of most of the West at that time.
We also saw a very large Quaker Meeting House:
The Quakers, always fine businessmen, excelled, alas! in the slave trade. Around 1740 they decided that to be a Quaker and to be involved in slavery was a dismal oxymoron. They came to this decision late when one considers the cosmic law of loving one's neighbor, which had been around for centuries, but not so horribly horribly late as in the Southern states. After the decision to eschew the slave trade, many left the community and continued the abomination of selling human beings. The large Meeting House was subsequently no longer filled with Quakers on First Day meetings, and was soon sold.
Roger Williams permitted everyone to practice their specific religion, which everyone apparently did, at least for a while. Only since the nineteenth century did the zeitgeist permit the good citizens of Rhode Island and elsewhere to believe in the Nobodaddy of the current age. (That's as close as I'll ever get to sounding like a Christian evangelical!)
The fault lies in both fundamentalism and in atheism; the fault lies in prose; the solution lies in poetry.
"O my Luve is like a red, red rose," wrote Robert Burns ecstatically. This is poetry. A fundamentalist interpretation of this would assert that since my love is really a rose, she therefore must have aphids and thorns.
Once it was possible to believe, without denying reason, that God ruled the external universe. Science and the Enlightenment have since taught us that the universe is absolutely indifferent to human needs. (I express this fact with the statement, "There is no smiley face beyond Arcturus").
The dualist creation myth asserts that God created the universe out of nothing; the true creation myth is that something arises from deep within ourselves. Fundamentalism since the Enlightenment, has been losing ground and will continue to do so. The ground, however, is still there.
The answer to the eternal question cannot be answered with prose. The prose answer--that everything is connected, as science teaches, and that we must practice love for our neighbor, is as far as prose goes, which is very far indeed. It is a prose poem.
Is it sad that so many of us live lives of distraction, following the progress of mechanical butterflies in ever expanding gyres? Yes, but real butterflies surround us as well, delighting all those who are able to see.
End of sermon. Time for high tea.
A motto for our second day aboard Queen Mary 2: Don't just do something, sit there.
We attended a show at The Britannia Theatre last night, featuring a doo-wop group named The Four Flashbacks. Most of us onboard remember, I think, when the songs sung were new, which means that we are, well, old. The Flashbacks were good; not exactly my cup of tea but a winsome brew nevertheless, with just the right amount of sugar.
Today we're off on a tour of colonial Providence R.I., The weather is good.
Providence, we're told, has more colonial buildings than any other place in America. They are, as one would expect, centrally located; they are also beautifully preserved.
What distinguished the colony of Rhode Island was that its founder, Roger Williams, permitted those of all faiths, (that is, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews) to practice their religions freely. (For the Puritans, religious liberty meant that one was indeed free--to be a Puritan). The question of Islam, not to mention that of the as yet almost unheard of faiths of Hinduism and Buddhism, apparently never arose).
We saw a fine synagogue:
Jews must have welcomed the opportunity to stand proudly on the island of their faith in a hostile sea, which was still the spiritual geography of most of the West at that time.
We also saw a very large Quaker Meeting House:
The Quakers, always fine businessmen, excelled, alas! in the slave trade. Around 1740 they decided that to be a Quaker and to be involved in slavery was a dismal oxymoron. They came to this decision late when one considers the cosmic law of loving one's neighbor, which had been around for centuries, but not so horribly horribly late as in the Southern states. After the decision to eschew the slave trade, many left the community and continued the abomination of selling human beings. The large Meeting House was subsequently no longer filled with Quakers on First Day meetings, and was soon sold.
Roger Williams permitted everyone to practice their specific religion, which everyone apparently did, at least for a while. Only since the nineteenth century did the zeitgeist permit the good citizens of Rhode Island and elsewhere to believe in the Nobodaddy of the current age. (That's as close as I'll ever get to sounding like a Christian evangelical!)
The fault lies in both fundamentalism and in atheism; the fault lies in prose; the solution lies in poetry.
"O my Luve is like a red, red rose," wrote Robert Burns ecstatically. This is poetry. A fundamentalist interpretation of this would assert that since my love is really a rose, she therefore must have aphids and thorns.
Once it was possible to believe, without denying reason, that God ruled the external universe. Science and the Enlightenment have since taught us that the universe is absolutely indifferent to human needs. (I express this fact with the statement, "There is no smiley face beyond Arcturus").
The dualist creation myth asserts that God created the universe out of nothing; the true creation myth is that something arises from deep within ourselves. Fundamentalism since the Enlightenment, has been losing ground and will continue to do so. The ground, however, is still there.
The answer to the eternal question cannot be answered with prose. The prose answer--that everything is connected, as science teaches, and that we must practice love for our neighbor, is as far as prose goes, which is very far indeed. It is a prose poem.
Is it sad that so many of us live lives of distraction, following the progress of mechanical butterflies in ever expanding gyres? Yes, but real butterflies surround us as well, delighting all those who are able to see.
End of sermon. Time for high tea.
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